Recently, a number of technologies have been introduced to provide high-speed transmission of multimedia data over existing wires within the home, such as power wires, coaxial cables, and phone lines. One such technology is the “G.hn” standard developed by the Telecommunication Standardization Sector of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU-T). In order to satisfy the quality of service (QoS) requirements of video delivery applications, the G.hn standard supports a number of features, such as centralized control of access to the communication medium (wire/line) and the ability to handle time-variant line rates between devices/nodes.
Efficient allocation of resources (e.g., access to the shared wire/line) for multi-user networks with time-varying channel capacity can be a complex problem, particularly as the number of devices/nodes increases. Current solutions use convex “optimization” techniques to allocate resources. Such techniques, however, are based on simplified models that ignore transmission overhead, such as preambles, headers, interframe gaps (IFGs), acknowledgments (ACKs), ACK interframe gaps (AIFGs), etc. In real-world applications that include such overhead, these techniques generally fail to provide an optimal solution/allocation.